I suspect Dilbert (along with Doonesbury and many other hugely popular serials) is disqualified on the grounds that it's been around longer than the Web, and hence can't really be described as a Webcomic. :-)

Personally, I think I'd go with Order of the Stick, but you might have to be a huge dork to get most of the jokes. ;-)

If God had meant us to fly, he would *never* have given us the railroads. --Michael Flanders

I just added an "other" option to the poll. I'd intended one to be
there, as people tend to get testy without one. :-)

I originally came up with a list by choosing from my own bookmarks
some of the strips which see a lot of traffic, and then looking
online for lists of the most popular strips generally. ysth
suggested another list, and there was some discussion of how many
options a poll should have. Since I have been busy, ysth was
kind enough to link all the poll choices, suggest a final list,
and post on my behalf. The "other" option got lost in the process.
Had I been more attentive, I'd have noted this in the final draft;
particularly in a poll like this one, we're not going to please
everyone, and being able to vote "none of the above" tends to
assuage people's outrage at seeing a list without $x.

As for the choices which are there, one thing I wanted was to
stick to web comics, rather than print comics which were
also published on the web. Web comics, like blogs, have become
quite the phenomenon of do-it-yourself culture which, often,
turn out to be better than what the professional writers have
had to offer. So if you read over the choices several times,
wondering, with increasing frustration, "Where's
Nancy?"... well,
sorry.

Anyway, I'm sure we missed some good choices, and it'll be
interesting to find out about them in the comments.

I was torn between User Friendly and 8-bit Theater. I also read Dilbert and Garfield pretty regularly. Knights of the Dinner Table, PvP, and a few others get my attention once in a while. I also love Homestar Runner.

Although I regularly read quite a few of the choices, my current favorite because I only recently discovered it and haven't yet read them all is Irregular Webcomic! It panders to my weaknesses for Lego, RPGs, and baaad puns, and the interleaving of 4 to 6 entirely different plots and casts makes almost anything possible.

A number of comics got dropped for somewhat arbitrary reasons to get the list down to a reasonable number. Reasons included: lower page rank, primarily a print comic, no (easily found) url to go directly to the latest strip, site intermittently down, comic no longer being updated, or having more than one storyline track.

What qualifies as a web comic? Something that's available on the web, or started on the web, or something that's exclusively on the web?

I personally like Liberty Meadows, but it hasn't been in syndication for a while. (new issue in comic book form recently, but that's it.) There are, however, a couple hundred strips that got censored online.

I voted for megatokyo because that was the only choice I regularly read, though Piro seems more interested in marketing these days.

My all-time favorite webcomic was the now departed Exploitation Now, whether it was focusing on porn stars and furry animals of questionable origins, or malcontent teenagers wishing to rule the world. My current fave is Patches because, well, those rodents/bears/whatevers are so cute. Plus I think Kelly rocks as an artist. I also enjoy Okay Pants, though the current Yeti theme isn't as fun as when Bello was around.

Unfortunately, I don't read a lot of comics on the web; so I went one by one through all of the links and voted for the best one. Dinosaur Comics actually made me chuckle. (T-rex Dating at the Water Treatment Plant)

I hadn't seen most of them before, I recognized User Friendly and Penny Arcade; but those were it.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other